RSS Feed Reminder
Posted on October 22, 2007 Posted by John Scalzi 21 Comments
After three weeks, I’m still getting people popping up claiming to be surprised Whatever is still an ongoing concern because their RSS feed has not been updating. So for anyone who still needs it, here’s the current RSS feed:
http://scalzi.com/whatever/?feed=rss2
Please update if you need to.
I know some folks are concerned about me missing out on some readers because of RSS confusion, but the fact is I myself so rarely use RSS feeds for anything I really can’t be roused to care all that much. I figure sooner or later the people with the faulty RSS feeds will either get curious and show up here and be amazed it’s an ongoing concern, or they’ll simply assume I’ve died in some horrible way, cycle through their grief and get along in their lives without me. Really, either works for me.
Any particular mourning procedures you hope will be observed while we cycle through our grief?
I use RSS bookmarks in Firefox, which is a handy way to see what’s new without going to look. Unless the RSS feed moves, in which case it isn’t.
I thought your site was still down until I finally realised the RSS feed had changed. Now I’ve updated it and all is right with the world.
I think the confusion is due to the fact that you seem to no longer have an Atom feed.
I pegged you for an RSS reader guy. You can waste so much more time, so much more efficiently. :)
(Although I admit to hating RSS readers that try to render the page themselves, I prefer Google Reader’s “next” bookmark — very nice)
I don’t even touch websites without a feed anymore. If I am going to procrastinate, I will do so efficiently, with 100+ feeds (NetNewsWire for the win).
Still, instead of posting this (which people can’t read because it is not showing up in their feed), you *could* add a 301 permanent redirect (from your old feed to your new one) to your .htaccess so people automagically get your new feed (easier than it sounds ;)). That’s what I did when I moved to WP from TypePad.
Ah! Now I can be lazy and skip an extra mouseclick.
Because the world’s not easy anymore. All those mouseclicks. No time to wash the carbon paper off your hands.
It took me a long time to pick upon the usefulness of RSS, but I dont know what I’d do without it now!
Apart from anything else, a lot of the blogs and news sites that I read are barred at work by the company’s content filer – but google reader is OK and lets me keep up to date while I’m at my desk.
Our host may not care to use RSS himself, but as long as he provides it I’m happy.
If you’re interested, there’s a reasonably straightforward way of either forwarding your old RSS feed directly to the new one, or putting up a “hey, it’s moved to here” 301 note.
“I figure sooner or later the people with the faulty RSS feeds will either get curious and show up here and be amazed it’s an ongoing concern,…”
…whereupon they will be baffled at the lack of a link to the current RSS feed anywhere on the front page… Well, after this post moves into the archives, anyway.
Really, you should do something about that.
I’ve got about 200 feeds I subscribe to, and I hadn’t noticed that it had gone away until I saw a link to a post on another blog and went ‘hey, where’d the whatever go to’? At which point I went and checked, found the new feed and all was well.
It always amuses me when blog authors get all angsty over their new site design, because unless there’s a reason to comment on a post I probably won’t see it.
I had actually not noticed the lack of updates, until Making Light linked to one of your recent posts. Then I said, “Hmm, I haven’t been reading any Scalzi for a while, I’d better resubscribe.” I’ve got a handy Bloglines tool for subscribing, so I’m not bothered by your lack of a link to your RSS feeds.
Well, I’ve assumed for a long time that you had died – and had been reanimated as Zombie Scalzi. As such, a live RSS feed would have been somewhat inappropriate, kind’ve an undead faux pas if you will.
Subscribe to Bloglines. See the light.
You know you want it.
What you described is exactly what happened to me – I suddenly realized that it’s been a few weeks since I’ve seen a new entry of yours in my Google Reader and went to the main site. Now getting the Whatever Goodness from the new RSS feed :).
Thanks!
It would have been nice to have a final entry made (manually if necessary) in the old feed that points to the new one.
In response to eric at #3:
http://scalzi.com/whatever/?feed=atom
Shocked the heck out of me. I thought you were still on hold with tech support.
Oh, don’t laugh. You all know you’ve waited that long before…
I’m popping up. Shocked! Amazed!
See, I actually did just this–I missed your blog, in spite of my 319 other subscriptions–and finally dropped by to see what in heck was going on.
I can’t decide if I should be insulted by your indifference or ecstatic that you are back….
Oh of course ecstasy wins. I also found you again from a reference from another blog. Good to see you. Like the site. Caught up on all the posts I missed. I will go skulking back to Bloglines now….
I’m a little upset with myself for not realizing I was missing something until today, but I’m glad I didn’t miss a review of the museum. But I guess that’s selfish of me.
John, this is absurdly easy to fix for your RSS followers. Paste this into your whatever/.htaccess file, and you should be in business:
RewriteRule ^index.rdf http://scalzi.com/whatever/?feed=rss2
RewriteRule ^index.xml http://scalzi.com/whatever/?feed=rss2
RewriteRule ^atom.xml http://scalzi.com/whatever/?feed=atom